Line Up
Back when I was a Berklee student, one of my professors introduced me to the works of pianist/composer Lennie Tristano. Lennie's phrasing and articulation was the first thing that I noticed, and it completely knocked me out. I came to have massive respect and admiration for his playing and composing.
Lennie's playing is unique in many ways, but the element on which I'll be focusing today is the attack in his technique. It sounds like a very solid and almost hard attack; yet he simultaneously manages to extract a legato texture from the piano. Those two things are seemingly in direct opposition. It seems incongruous that a hard attack could also yield a legato quality, but Lennie does just that. His rhythmic phrasing is something I'll try to describe as being almost straight eighth notes, placed just behind the beat with a rock-solid sense of time. I find it to be both powerful and beautiful.
Here are a couple of examples to illustrate Lennie's technique, his legato, the attack in his keyboard approach, and his rhythmic phrasing:
As I was listening to "Line Up" last week, I noticed something in his sound that had previously escaped me. His technique on "Line Up" is such that it seems that the tone and timbre of the notes and phrases is actually changing as he plays. This is seemingly impossible on piano, as you have control over dynamics, but not tone, as the instrument strikes the string in the same location each time. On guitar, you have total control over tone in many ways; the most elemental of which is where you locate your right hand. Closer to the neck results in a darker, rounder tone; closer to the bridge yields a brighter, sharper tone. In "Line Up," it sounds as if Lennie is changing the tone of the piano within the phrases. Like he's coloring what he's playing by varying the tone of the instrument. Just by his articulation and attack. It really struck me. How is he doing that? How is that possible? But to my way of hearing, he is doing just that.
When listening to non-guitar instruments, orchestras, and chamber groups in classical music, I am always thinking about how to capture what that instrument or orchestra is doing and translating it to guitar. The guitar has a vast palette of potential colors and textures that aren't always accessed. By learning to translate or capture what's possible on other instruments, I can elicit non-guitar textures and fabrics from guitar. Or that's the goal, anyway. When I noticed this change of timbre and tone in Lennie's playing, I immediately pictured moving or shifting the location of my right hand while playing. Not just while playing, but specifically across the span of a long phrase, for example. Thus changing colors within a single phrase or passage.
Over the past week, I've been working on that. It's fascinating to me. Something that seems so basic on guitar can in fact reveal such additional textures. I've never seen or heard of other guitarists shifting the location of their right hand while playing, or within a phrase, but I'm working on that. I'm not trying to say that I'm the first to discover this; not at all. It's just not something I've noticed in other guitarists, though someone has to be doing it; this can't be a new technique or discovery.
But it is new for me. And pretty exciting. I'm still learning it and will continue to work on it, but I love where it's going.
Thank you, Lennie.
-kk
Postscript:
There's an interesting documentary about Lennie on YouTube:
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